


My Heart is My Armor (She's the Tear in My Heart)

by blak_cat



Category: Carmilla (Web Series)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-10-04
Updated: 2015-10-04
Packaged: 2018-04-24 18:50:49
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,116
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4931203
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/blak_cat/pseuds/blak_cat
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Regrouping and researching would be a lot easier if Laura could make heads or tails of her situation with Carmilla--and if the library could stop playing mood music and leaving out bottles of wine.</p>
            </blockquote>





	My Heart is My Armor (She's the Tear in My Heart)

_She's the tear in my heart, I'm alive, she's the tear in my heart, I'm on fire, she's the tear in my heart, take me higher than I've ever been..._

\--

Laura woke up warm. Considerably warmer than when she fell asleep. A blanket that had not been there when she was curled in on herself and shivering was neatly placed over top of her and tucked at the edges. She turned in her makeshift bed, shuffling the blankets down and poking her head and shoulders out until she sat up. 

LaFontaine was typing away on one of the laptops they found in their search to set up Ethernet in their hovel. They paused periodically to scribble words in a notebook and continued. They researched a lot the past couple of days. What exactly they were researching was beyond Laura, because she had no idea how one goes about Googling help for dealing with a post-occult resource acquisition conglomerate that officially doesn’t exist or a primordial demonic entity that can somehow survive a tumble into an equally primordial anglerfish. 

“Hey,” Laura called to them lightly, stretching. They looked up and nodded. 

“Morning,” they said. 

“Is it?” 

It was impossible to tell in the dark. 

“I’ve been using her as a clock,” they said, nodding to lump on the floor across the room. 

Carmilla was curled up into herself with her bunched up jacket as a pillow. She had gifted the majority of the pillows and blankets she found to Laura and Laf and, as it would appear, the one blanket she kept for herself was now wrapped tightly around Laura. 

“She stumbled in a few hours ago so I’d say we’re at about 9am,” they said. 

Laura sighed and stood up completely. She took the excess blanket, and carefully as possibly, draped it over Carmilla who didn’t stir an inch from the contact. Her stomach moved in phantom breaths, her mouth hanging open slightly and hair pulled back into a messy bun, fly-aways everywhere. She’d always been a heavy sleeper when she finally did fall into a sleep. Had it not been for echoes of inhaling and exhaling Laura might of thought she was dead. Well, _actually_ dead. 

Laura walked back over to sit next to Laf and opened one of the many packets of snack cakes that Carmilla had overturned a vending machine to get for them. 

“Whatcha looking up?” Laura said mid-chew. 

“Anything that might help us,” they sighed. “If Carmilla’s really convinced the dean is out there somewhere then we need to at least try and have knowledge on our side. So far, the searches have turned up a lot of maybes.”  
“Maybes?” 

“Well, nothing’s concrete, but look at this,” they said, pulling out their notebook. “I kind of fell down a rabbit hole after Googling ‘Lilita Morgan’ but I think I got a lead on a few of the internet pages about Lilith.” 

“Lilith? As in—“

“As in Babylonian, Biblical, ancient demonic villain,” they said. “Have fun with her as a mother-in-law.” 

Laura chose to ignore that. 

“I mean, Lilith is all over the internet. There was this page I found on another university’s website: ‘Lilith: Mother of Vampires’,” they said. 

Laura groaned. 

“That sounds, unfortunately, entirely correct,” she said. “I’m not sure I even want to ask but what does it say?” 

“Well, the bad news is she's old, like super old,” they said. 

“How old?”

“According to legend she goes back to before the Book of Genesis.” 

“Are you kidding me?” 

Laura dropped her head onto the desk in another groan and pounded it a few times on the wood while Laf waited patiently next to her. It was about 30 seconds before Laura took a breath, told herself she could handle it, and took a bite of the snack cake, motioning Laf to continue. 

“Essentially, she was Adam’s first wife and because she was basically made out of the same earth or rocks or whatever, she considered herself his equal—“

“As she should—“

“Okay, maybe save applauding the soul sucking demon’s feminism for later?” 

“Sorry.” 

“Anyway. Basically she got thrown out of Eden for disobedience she vowed that she and her ‘children’ would feed off the ‘children of Adam’ for eternity. I mean it’s all legend and folklore but…” 

“Cool.” 

Laura sat back and threw back the snack cake, crumbling the wrappings and slapping them down on the table. 

“So, in conclusion, 90% certain Silas University’s Dean of Students is an antediluvian demon quite literally hell-bent on the destruction of humankind,” they said, sitting back. 

“So what do we do with this information then?” Laura said. 

“Right now? List all the ways we are massively screwed,” they said. 

Laura sighed and as if on cue, shuffling was heard from the other side of the room accompanied by a groan and they both looked up to see Carmilla’s form in the dark tossing to lay on her back in her sleep. She was dreaming of her mother, Laura knew from the mingled gibberish she made out when Carmilla’s dream-drenched words were coherent enough to reveal a plot. Ever since realizing she was alive Carmilla’s sleep grew dark, at least darker than Laura remembered it when they shared a bed. 

“Did she always flop around in bed like that?” they asked, shutting the laptop. 

“Sometimes,” Laura said quietly. 

Carmilla was not as prone to nightmares as Laura had suspected when they first began to sleeping next to each other But when they did come, they were vicious and left Carmilla quiet for hours on end and frowning into the night air. Laura never asked about them and when Carmilla woke up to the sounds of Laura trying to calm her down, they never talked about them. She simply lay in her arms until she fell back asleep. 

When it became clear Carmilla was not going to calm down of her own volition, Laura stood up and walked over to where she slept. She knelt down beside her and gently placed a hand to Carmilla’s head, rubbing gently as she shushed her. Carmilla’s fidgeting slackened until it stopped and eventually her mumbling did too. Laura kept up her ministration until Carmilla’s scowl melted back into the emotionless face of rest. She held her hand there for a few more seconds before pulling away. 

Laf’s smirk was waiting.

“Don’t even start,” Laura said, getting up and walking back. 

“Looks like you started it all on your own,” they said. “Are you two actually going to talk this time?”

“There’s nothing to talk about.”

“Do you hear yourself?” 

Laura pouted and leaned back against the wall, dropping down until her butt hit the floor with a slight bounce and she plopped the rest of the way. She blew a stream of air out of her mouth perhaps a little too obnoxiously and frowned. Maybe she was feeling a little too sorry for herself, but it's not like she could just look up "how to deal with cohabiting with your vampire ex after betraying her and killing another person on her behalf" on Cosmos' website. She thought once or twice about Googling it.

She wasn’t allowed to be doing this. They were in the middle of a complete disaster, possibly turning into an apocalypse and she was hung up on _feelings_. They’d been set at a steady brew beneath the surface for some time, but after _that_ , after what she did, she couldn’t ignore the four letter word that seemed to be a tattoo beat onto the inside of her chest from the betrayer below her breastplate. It’s hard to ignore when you kill another person to save someone and the guilt that comes with feeling gushing relief in the face of a murder.

She killed someone to save Carmilla. She’d wrestled with what that meant for days and now she was petting her back to sleep through a nightmare. Nothing about this was appropriate at all. Especially the butterflies she got when Carmilla winked at her yesterday while tossing her a pack of cookies or the way her heart hammered away when they brushed hands while exchanging books in the fruits of research. 

There was literally no time for this. Chasing romantic notions in the middle of a state of emergency was immature and something she berated every action movie ever for. She was not going to be a lovesick teenager while people were dying and her friends in danger. But someone needed to tell her heart that before it broke her chest. 

“Honestly, I might stomach you two having weird library dinner dates over enduring more of your dysfunctional nonverbal communications,” they said, leaning forward to begin typing on the laptop. 

“That is so not happening,” Laura said. 

“Well say something at least,” they said. “No one is saying you have to change your Facebook relationship status and take selfies—actually, absolutely no one wants that. But I think there’s a sentence you’re kind of dying to say to her that should probably be put out there before the next time one of you is about to die.” 

“First of all—“

“Don’t deny it,” they said without a hint of teasing, Laura frowned to find Laf staring back seriously. “Don’t cheapen everything we went through by lying. Please. Perry and J.P. are both off in danger right now and have no idea how much I miss them.” 

Laura looked down as their voice began to waver and they took a shuddered breath to steady themselves. 

“But Carmilla is here to hear about how much you care, don’t waste it.” 

And then they went back to the computer in full force, slamming down on the keys and Laura wondered whether they were really typing anything at all or trying to make a point. 

\---

Carmilla woke up hours later from the nightmare incident, grumbling and pale as she stumbled over to where they’d piled up their food and dug around for the cup of blood the library supplied a day or so earlier. 

“Morning,” Carmilla nodded to Laf who barely gave a nod back. “Or not.” 

“They’re just like, eyeball deep in research, which, by the way, turned up some unfortunately disturbing things about your mother,” Laura said. 

“Such as?” Carmilla yawned and then took a sip. 

“Well, we’ll start with the fact that she’s 8 jillion years old and is some Babylonian demon lady?” 

Carmilla snorted and put the cup down. 

“Mother was way too proud of those stories, I think she made up 90% of them herself,” she said. She wiped her mouth. 

“Yeah but did you ever actually meet someone older than her?” Laura asked. “Maybe your vampire grandma?” 

“Mother never mentioned a sire,” Carmilla shrugged. 

“Okay so take that and the--let me stress-- _multiple_ ancient texts referring to her as the literal ‘mother of vampires’, doesn’t make you a little uneasy?” 

Carmilla sighed and tapped her fingers on the table in thought. 

“I mean, I always knew she was dangerous and old, I guess finding out exactly how much could never compare to what I cooked up in my head,” she said. “But, maybe I’m wrong.” 

“Comforting.” 

Laura pouted as Carmilla tossed a brownie cake at her face and sniggered when it hit her square in the forehead. Laura tried to frown but broke into a small smile when she saw Carmilla’s own and felt her cheeks go pink. They darkened to brazen red when she caught Laf raising an eyebrow.

“Well, while you entertain yourselves with depressing research, I’m going to see what this place has to cough up in the way of entertainment,” Carmilla said, stretching the sleep away one last time. 

“Entertainment?” Laura said. 

“I thought I saw some Brecht essays a few stacks that way,” she said. 

“Oh right, Carmilla brand entertainment.” 

Carmilla shrugged, brushing past Laura on her walk out. After a solid 5 seconds of even more eyebrow raising from Laf and her own jumpy feet, she bounced after her. Carmilla didn’t miss a beat or even acknowledge that Laura had joined her. 

“I was getting cabin fever from the same three rows of books.” 

They walked down several rows of books, careful not to lose the faint glow of the light by their home base in case the library switched on them. Though it had been surprisingly calm for the past few nights. Carmilla seemed to conquer with Laf’s theory that the library was trying to be of some help, it set out blood for Carmilla every couple of mornings managed to keep the chilly nights to a minimum even though they could see their breath in other parts of the building. 

They rounded a corner and came across an alcove and Laura heard Carmilla gasp before she stepped forward and began shifting through a pile of vinyls stacked up on the table. 

“I think the place likes me after all,” Carmilla said. 

“Why’s that?” Laura asked, eying the bottle of wine and _two_ glasses suspiciously. 

Carmilla was fiddling with something in the corner while Laura inspected the bottle of wine with an obnoxious German name and the year 2012 printed across it. Laura heard the scratch of a record needle and before she even turned around she heard the riffing of a trumpet and the scatting of Ella Fitzgerald. 

_Stars shining bright above you_

_Night breezes seem to whisper I love you…_

Carmilla looked like a kitten in a room full of yarn. She sat inches from the record player, her ear even closer as if to hear every possible tone and beat the record player had to offer. Louis Armstrong kicked in on the second verse and Laura thought Carmilla might cry. 

“This is an original vinyl,” she said. “Mine would go missing all the time because Mattie used to—“

She dropped her smile and her gaze immediately and Laura felt like her chest was going to implode, slowly, crack by crack. Air was starting to leave her lungs at the same cadence and she didn’t deserve to have another breakdown in front of Carmilla. 

“You—you can tell me,” Laura said quietly. She wasn’t sure if it was the right thing to say but she needed to talk before her heart and lungs caught fire completely. 

“She just used to hide them a lot,” Carmilla shrugged. “Sometimes in random places in our apartment, sometimes I’d find one on top of the Eiffel Tower. She said it was her way of making a cat fetch.” 

Carmilla’s smile was small and sad and entirely for herself so Laura looked away and blinked back tears she hadn’t earned. The image of Carmilla, on her knees, Mattie in her arms was something she saw nightly. The twisted look on her face was like nothing Laura had ever seen there before and she put it there herself. The amount of things Laura had stolen from Carmilla in one moment of weakness could never be repaid.

Carmilla sighed and turned back to the music, closing her eyes for a moment, ear perked and Laura tried not to throw up at imagining she might be thinking of her and Mattie dancing in some jazz lounge together. Eventually, the darkness hovering around Carmilla’s eyes dissipated and she smiled more genuinely as the music played on.

Laura sat down at the table and watched Carmilla in her own world, her fingers tapping on her own knee, perhaps without even knowing. She even swayed, on occasion, to the swell of the trumpets and saxes behind the singers and as the song ended she laughed to herself, standing up and pulling the needle off carefully. 

She fingered through some of the others, pulling out another choice record, dusting it off and replacing it on the spin deck. A piano took over this time with the steady sound of a cymbal in the background keeping time. Laura thought she almost saw Carmilla hold back an attempt to snap. 

_Let there be you, let there be me_

_Let there be oysters under the sea…_

It was less familiar than the first song but Laura recognized the voice from many a Christmas albums as Nat King Cole. 

_Let there be cuckoos, a lark and dove_

_But first of all, let there be love…_

Wait a minute.

She sat up and carefully picked through the music selections herself. “Till There Was You” by Etta Jones, “Autumn in New York” by Billie Holiday, “Say a Little Prayer For You” by Aretha. There were all singles, all famous…love songs. She looked back to the wine with narrow eyes. Why the sneaky, cunning, little—

“Is that wine?” Carmilla asked, her trance temporarily broken while she put on “As Time Goes By” by Sinatra. “Where’d you get that?” 

“No where,” Laura said quickly, standing up and stepping away from Carmilla’s approaching form with little grace. 

Carmilla made a face but turned back to the records with interest, perusing the wine for a second, and not even noticing the two glasses positions next to it. Laura turned around to face the vast emptiness of the rest of the library. 

“I know what you’re doing,” she hissed. “Knock it off.”

She wondered if it was chuckling back it her when she turned around to find a vase of roses joined the other items on the table. Laura recalled Carmilla’s request once to be staked while she was tied up and honestly, could understand the sentiment now. It was bad enough that she’d bawled all over her and she very kindly told Laura not to worry about the giant wet spot on her shirt like something out of a goddamn rom com, but now the library of all things was trying to play match maker. 

“Too bad we didn’t nab your mom’s jazz library before we left,” Laura said. “Might have had a little more—uh, genre variety.” 

Smooth. 

“Maman tried to make up for me missing out on jazz by showering me with it every chance she got,” Carmilla said. “Between the two of us we probably have over 200 songs.” 

Oh right. The 70 years locked in a coffin. Well that was a sobering enough thought to take her right out of this teen date movie nightmare accented by crippling guilt. It seemed that way for Carmilla as well because her almost giddy smile was gone as she set the records down and toyed for a second with the wine bottle before ignoring it as well. She pulled the needle of the record and nodded for them to keep going. 

In the dim light, Laura caught glimpses of odd marks across Carmilla’s neck and arms that she was fairly certain (even while blinded by the highs of sex) had not been there before. She’d almost reached out to touch one a night ago while Carmilla slept but backed off. Now she was so jittery with fear that the library was going to start up a chorus of “Kiss the Girl” that she was desperate for some sort of topic change. 

“Are those from the baron?” she said, pointing. “Just—out of curiosity.” 

Wow. 

“You think a bunch of little frat boys could take me down in a fair fight?” she said with a smirk. 

Silver then. The baron always did play dirty. Laura thought of the wound on her chest, how quickly it seemed to heal and yet she was sure she saw a scar there upon fleeting glance. Would these cuts scar over too and permanently fix themselves to her skin for eternity? Would that be Laura’s legacy, scars across Carmilla’s existence? Laura probably deserved nothing more. In another timeline she might have kissed Carmilla's wounds until she could feel nothing but her lips where there was once pain. Now, Laura's lips might just be the scars themselves. 

“How’d they catch you?” she said. 

“I told you I was coming to answer your begs for help,” Carmilla said, pausing to run her finger down the spine of a book and angle her head to try and read the title. “Walked right into a trap.” 

What exactly happened that night remained a mystery. Carmilla said Perry told her off when she called back but Perry had been right with Laura as they were leaving. The mix up was odd and with Perry nowhere to be found, it was impossible to figure out. But Laura took her word for it. And now she had the scars from chains and beatings to prove that she had tried. 

“I woke up in chains and then the gasbag started dragging me to mother’s manse,” she said. “It was a walk full of cliché villain monologues and he even asked me if I had any final requests.”

“Let me guess, you asked me to go do something very profane to himself in German?’ Laura said, nudging her shoulder. 

Carmilla turned to look at her and didn’t smile. Laura felt her own smile faultering under the gaze but Carmilla didn’t confirm or deny Laura’s theory as they walked on. Eventually the topic changed to _yes Laura, this is why Kazantzaki’s “Saviors of God” is a very interesting text—Laura don’t you roll your eyes at me_ and even some teasing on Carmilla's end when Laura dug into the first editions of _Harry Potter_.

They found a stash of board games and carried back a very archaic version of Monopoly where you could purchase things like the Fertile Crescent and instead of the railway it was the Silk Road. Also in there was a chessboard whose pieces looked like they ran the gamut of mythological creatures. 

All of this was of course punctuated by the library magically leading them into the section for antique Valentine’s cards and then eventually launching copies from the classic romance section at them (which to be fair was better than last semester and the dangerous copy of _Absalom! Absalom!_ ).

The returned to Laf who was still wide-eyed and concentrated on the computer like every second not spent staring at it would mean Perry’s hastening to her doom. Though it seemed the more they learned about their enemy, the more hastened it all was. 

They set up the lamp like a campfire and managed to pull Laf away from their frenzied work long enough to sit around it. Though ghost stories seemed fitting, they were silent. Laura was curled up in a blanket next to Laf while Carmilla was by herself, elbows on knees, and back to the wall, reading one of the books she’d pulled off the shelves. 

“For the record,” she said, breaking the silence a few minutes after LaFontaine had dosed off. “I know what the library was trying to do, too.” 

Laura felt her cheeks pinken. 

“I just get really excited about jazz music,” she winked and Laura laughed, letting out the breath she might as well have been holding all night. 

Carmilla seemed poised to go back to reading and let the elephant in the room, only half acknowledged, continue its rampage before she spoke again. 

“Don’t make her watch me die.” 

“Huh?” 

“You asked what I told Vordenberg as a last request, that was it.” 

Carmilla did not look up from her book and Laura could tell from the pattern of her eyes that she was only pretending to read while her own mouth dropped open. _Don’t make her watch me die._ Carmilla had asked Vordenberg to unburden her and let herself be punished in solitude.

“Obviously it was denied,” Carmilla chuckled. “After which point the profanity infused German did, in fact, come out.”

Carmilla had asked to die alone to spare Laura pain. But, oh God, if Vordenberg had agreed then she’d be headless and in a hole somewhere. His greatest mistake was, perhaps, not heeding Carmilla’s plea. 

Perhaps Carmilla was wrestling with her own inner turmoil as well over that. Laura, not a week ago, kissed Carmilla and promised her a talk after their survived. In the meantime she hurt Carmilla possibly more than anyone, her mother included, had hurt her in her life. Giving up her own inner peace and delivering the student body, and perhaps the world, in exchange for Carmilla’s life seemed like a fair trade no matter how she looked at. 

And maybe she should stop feeling guilty about that.

And there Carmilla was, bound and dragged, embarrassing herself by asking her enemy for a favor and having it denied. She was willing to die just to spare Laura more heartache. 

As she fell asleep, curled up inches from Carmilla, she realized maybe this whole navigating her emotions thing wasn’t so bad when she wasn't the only one in love.

**Author's Note:**

> Not enough people are writing library shenans, so I'm doing it. The library 100% ships it. 
> 
> Songs referenced in piece: 
> 
> Dream a Little Dream of Me by Ella Fitzgerald and Louis Armstrong
> 
> Let There Be Love by Nat King Cole 
> 
> Song used in prologue/title: Tear in My Heart by 21 Pilots


End file.
